This is exactly what I though after the release date came and went, then a sudden public beta and a push of the “real” release date back to June. Using the beta for several months It’s very obvious they have broken more than they have fixed (unrelated things that have been stable in 5.3)

It must be tough for you guys too basically maintaining 3 – 4 concurrent editors. I think a lot of devs are right there with you – in order to support various platforms like Apple TV, performance issues and compatibility I’m mirroring 3 project files in 4.6.8, 5.2.2 and 5.3.4, and now testing in 5.4 – i think all of us want to focus on just one release:)

Stability is REALLY important. It’s safe to say millions of people love Unity very passionately, and if we can rely on upgrading without production breaking changes, that will have as much value as introducing new features.

On OSX you can rename the folder where Unity is installed to something different (e.g: “Unity5.3”), before installing the second version. The new version will be installed to the “/Applications/Unity” folder.
On Windows you can select the destination folder where Unity will be copied to, during the installation process.

As Ricardo says, Unity is perfectly fine to have multiple versions installed side-by-side – you just have to be careful on OS X that you rename your existing Unity install first, as we always install to /Applications/Unity on OS X.

You need to tick the same boxes for each version. You can’t take the downloaded modules between versions as they will have changed. We are working on things so one day this may not be the case but for now you do need to download them all for each version.

I have a question about retina Support. It says retina will be supported for 5.4 but it not yet supported. I have been waiting for years for. it is only supported on Mac OS but not on Windows. When can we expect Windows Support of HiDPI? Thanks.

I say bravo unity , this is the right direction to take .
Unity always surprises me with how much they actually care about what the community thinks .
So bravo and thank you for taking your time , Dont rush it at all I can wait for a well performing and stable release so again thanks and keep up the good work!

When are you actually going to fully update all the documentation and tutorials? Every update seems to break some old functionality of the tutorials projects. I want to learn on my own and teach other people, and messing about fixing old projects doesn’t help at all.

You need to focus on your unit tests. You add a feature and break things not even related. “Around 300 unit tests” is a joke for a project this large and so many platforms. That needs to be your first step to making things right.

As some point you need to deal with the serialization, it’s such a mess and is the root of a lot of the issues developers run into as well as you guys do implementing features. From what I hear, it is the main reason your number one requested feature (nested prefabs) keeps getting abandoned.

I still am skeptical, the entire 5.x release has been a joke. There are great features hidden in there but it is so buggy and quirky it isn’t even up to 4.x in terms of reliability. Building in 5.x is so damn slow now as well, Cloud Build isn’t the solution for everyone.

I’m not sure where you got the idea that we have “only 300 unit tests.” Calculating the exact number of automated tests that we have in the codebase is nontrivial because we have many different suites that are run at different times, parametrised tests, etc – but we ran over 16,000 unique tests (i.e. not counting running the same test again) on the 5.3 branch between 5.3.3 and 5.3.4.

It’s a really good move to open up your beta to Personal Users. I feel it’s a great move to help Unity get more feedback on what’s working and what’s not. My personal project will most likely move to the Beta but at my work we will use the stable

This is very much appreciated and needed! The 5.x cycle so far was far from optimal to us, targeting iOS. What we (my team) need from Unity is a robust and fast engine. We don’t feel we need more feature than the current version already offers, this might of course totally differ from project to project.

We’re still stuck with 5.1.x due to performance issues in more recent Unity versions. We tried to update to 5.2.x a few weeks after it has been released, but experienced many crash issues that made us decide to roll back to 5.1.

This was when we realized upgrading Unity just doesn’t work as smooth as we expected and put a lot of effort into an experimental build of our game that builds with 5.3 and runs automated tests to (hopefully) catch many crashes and performance issues that we report to you guys hoping to get a stable and fast build.

Unity 5.3 seems to be more robust than 5.2 at the time, but suffers from performance issues (Case 761024), which I believe is the main reason why we didn’t upgrade to 5.3.

Thanks for concentrating on bug-fixes and performance issues. Looking forward to every new beta!

This was when we realized upgrading Unity just doesn’t work as smooth as we expected and put a lot of effort into an experimental build of our game that builds with 5.3 and runs automated tests to (hopefully) catch many crashes and performance issues that we report to you guys hoping to get a stable and fast build.

Did you build your automated tests on top of the Unity Test Tools? One thing we’re very interested in doing is finding games that have done this, and actually bringing their test suites in-house and making them part of the tests we run regularly. Reach out to me (richardf@unity3d.com) if you think this might be an option for you.

Glad to see Unity agrees with that. Personally, 5.3 was a disaster by releasing the multi-scene stuff, causing unplanned work on our part to fix things up and also caused big issues for several middleware packages we use, some of which still are not fixed properly.

Indeed, you nailed it – for people with a live project, updating to Unity 5.3 was a disaster(from 5.1), especially if you use a decent amount of third party assets from the asset store. It took us a couple weeks to put everything back together and fix stuff, and we still have the quality settings bug in our LIVE GAME on Steam. Still waiting for Unity to fix it – currently users cannot change the quality of textures due to the bug in builds – if they do all UI textures gets jacked up. Both the UI bug in builds and the Multi Scene editing bugs just seems like results of not testing enough.

This is key. We’re currently focusing on this in my non-Unity day job (300+ developers and QA). Stable branches should only release fixes, not new features unless it’s absolutely necessary *AND* a completely tested back-merge. And even then, only merge to the Version.X unstable stable branch before merging to Version.Release stable.